A glossary of the statistical terms used across puckmodel. For a guided tour of the card layout itself, see How to Read a Card. All ratings are model estimates, not official NHL statistics.
Core units
Net goals added
The site’s common currency: how many goals a player adds (or costs) his team versus a league-average player, in calibrated model units. Usually quoted per 82 games so careers of different lengths compare directly; the team-page forecast tables instead show season totals (per-82 rate × projected games).
xG (expected goals)
The probability that a given shot becomes a goal, based on its location, type, and game situation (strength state, rebound within 3 seconds, rush chances). Summing xG over shots gives expected goals for/against.
WPA (win probability added)
A weight on each chance for how much it moves the odds of winning: a chance in a tied third period counts more than one in a blowout. Used to price expected-goal flow into wins.
rel (relative to context)
Measured against what a league-average player would produce in the same circumstances: score state, home/road, zone starts, strength state. Since 2026-07 the components are also re-centered so the league average is exactly zero in every season.
rel-xG-WPA Elo
The engine behind the on-ice ratings: win-probability-priced expected-goal flow, measured relative to league-average context, run through a game-by-game Elo update.
Rating components
Overall
The sum of the seven skater components below. For goalies, Overall is GSAx per 82 games instead (the skater components don’t apply).
EV Offense / EV Defense
On-ice expected-goal creation (offense) and suppression (defense) at even strength versus league-average context, scaled to the calibrated marginal value — five skaters share the on-ice flow, so the marginal is ~4.4× smaller than face value.
PP / PK
The same priced on-ice flow on the power play and penalty kill.
Finishing
Goals above expected (GAx) on the shooter’s own shots on goal — individual credit, at face value.
Penalties
Penalties drawn minus taken, priced at that season’s measured value of a drawn minor (≈0.16–0.20 goals: the average net goals scored in the two minutes after a penalty is drawn, measured league-wide per season), re-centered so average penalty behavior is zero.
Faceoffs
Net faceoff wins × 0.010 goals (fixed-effects calibration). Shown for context: post-draw flow already appears in the on-ice components, so this partially overlaps them.
Goaltending
GSAx (goals saved above expected)
xGA − GA given the shots faced: positive means the goalie stopped more than the quality of shots he faced predicted.
xSv%
The save percentage an average goalie would post on the same shots; compare with actual Sv%.
Reb/100
Rebounds yielded per 100 shots faced; lower is better — rebound control is where goalie skill persists most.
Card panels
NHL EDGE (2021+)
Puck-and-player tracking from the NHL’s EDGE system, which only exists from 2021-22 on (longer careers start blank): hardest shot and top skating speed in mph, and 20+ mph speed bursts per game. Boxes are colored by where the number ranks within that season’s tracked cohort (skaters with ≥50 shots on goal); the career column is the career best (bursts: the career rate).
Competition / Teammates (on-ice context)
Who a player skated against and with, season by season: the shared-TOI-weighted average Overall net goals/82 of the opposing skaters he faced (Competition) and of his own linemates (Teammates), goalies excluded on both sides. The panel also lists each season’s four most common teammates with the share of the player’s ice time they were on for.
40-game form
The career’s shape in one line: a trailing 40-game moving average of the Overall rating, in the same net-goals-per-82 units. The dot marks the career peak and the number at the right end is the current value. Even elite careers dip below zero here — 40 games is a small sample. Goalie cards draw the same line for GSAx/82 over the last 40 appearances.
Career net goals (cumulative)
The running career total of the same per-game net goals the 40-game form line averages: how much value the career has banked versus a league-average player, in goals. A flat stretch is league-average play; a rising slope is value being added. Goalie cards accumulate GSAx instead.
Shot mix — type & location
The career shot diet: bars show the share of the player’s shots on goal by type, each priced as net goals per 82 (goals above xG on those shots; types with fewer than 100 career shots are unpriced). The map colors each zone of the offensive half by his share of shots from that spot versus the league average for his position — blue means more than a typical F or D shoots from there, red less.
Save map
The goalie equivalent: each zone colored by save percentage above or below what that zone’s shot locations predict.
Projections & simulation
Projected value
The simulation’s forward-looking estimate for 2026-27: recent seasons weighted by a 0.55 decay, age-translated using the skill aging curves, and shrunk toward the mean for small samples. The Projected columns on the site combine its three parts: on-ice value + finishing GAx + net penalties.
Projected GP / expected games
Each rostered player’s expected games played, from durability history. Forecast tables multiply per-82 rates by this to get season totals.
Projected standings
10,000 Monte Carlo simulations of the season: 12F/6D/2G rosters taken from Daily Faceoff’s projected line combinations (every player still priced by the model itself), team strength from the projected player values, game outcomes from a calibrated win-probability model including back-to-back rest edges.
Playoff %
The share of the 10,000 simulated seasons in which the team makes the playoffs.
Δ (rank change)
Projected league-wide finish compared to the team’s actual 2025-26 finish.
Small-sample shrinkage
Career rates in team tables are regressed toward zero by GP/(GP+40), so a hot streak in a handful of games doesn’t read like a career.
Player archetypes
How archetypes are built
A k-means clustering of every skater career with 150+ GP since 2010-11 (goalies excluded) over 24 style features: the seven rating components, playmaking, EV/PP/SH ice time, goals, assists, PIM, shots, hits, blocks, takeaways/giveaways, finishing per shot, slap/backhand/tip shot shares, and rebound generation. Every feature is measured relative to the player’s own era (z-scored within each season and position group, averaged over the career), so a 2012 grinder and a 2025 grinder land in the same bucket. Forwards form 8 clusters, defensemen 7; the names are editorial, the memberships are the data’s. A player whose role changed over his career is typed by the career blend.
First-line star
The franchise offense drivers: elite even-strength and power-play value, top playmaking and takeaway rates, draw far more penalties than they take. The smallest forward group.
Top-six sniper
Finishing first: the best goals-above-expected per shot, heavy power-play usage, slap-happy shot diets — and the worst even-strength defense of any forward group.
Two-way top-six forward
Scoring forwards who also do the dirty work: faceoffs, penalty kill, net-front tips and rebound generation alongside above-average offense.
Net-front middle-six
Average scoring rates but a paint-heavy game: tip-ins, backhands and rebounds, with penalty-kill time.
Complementary skill winger
Skill without the heavy lifting: decent finishing in softer minutes, little shorthanded, blocking or physical involvement.
Shutdown/PK center
The most shorthanded time among forwards, plus blocks and faceoffs; offense is an afterthought.
Penalty minutes two and a half standard deviations above average, big hit totals, the fewest minutes — and they take far more penalties than they draw.
Franchise No. 1 defenseman
The elite cluster, in every flavor: the model’s best even-strength value, takeaways and minutes. Most run a first power-play unit (Makar, Karlsson), but the group is defined by total impact, not the power play — Slavin and Doughty live here too.
Top-pair puck-mover
Big minutes and real offense with power-play time — the second tier of offense-tilted No. 1s and 2s.
Mobile shutdown D
Defense with the stick, not the body: heavy defensive deployment, strong takeaway and penalty-drawn rates, very few penalty minutes or hits.
Sheltered shooting D
Modest minutes but the best finishing per shot of any defense group — low-volume shooters who convert.
Shot-blocking PK defenseman
Defense-first: heavy shorthanded time, shot-blocking and hits, essentially no power play.
Physical shutdown D
The heavy games: hits and penalty minutes well above average in modest minutes, takes more penalties than he draws.
Sheltered third-pair D
The fewest minutes at even strength and shorthanded; solid defensive results in sheltered deployment.
Data conventions
Career weighted average
Career values are games-played-weighted means over seasons, not simple averages, so a 20-game season counts less than a full one.
Empirical-Bayes shrinkage
Small samples are pulled toward the league average before being called skill: on the cards and the Players page, each component’s career rate is blended with the league mean using a prior worth a component-specific number of games, so 40 hot games move a career number far less than 400 do. Per-season values are never shrunk.
Active players
The Players table includes everyone on a 2026-27 cap sheet who either played in 2025-26 or is on a current NHL roster — this keeps injured players and call-ups while excluding retired dead-cap contracts (buyouts, LTIR) — plus unsigned free agents: restricted free agents under their 2025-26 team with “RFA” in the cap column (assumed re-signed), unrestricted free agents under team “UFA” with their own card deck.
Cap hit
2026-27 cap hit from the cap-sheet snapshot; contract efficiency on the cards is career net goals/82 per $M of cap hit.